Higgins Armory Museum to close after 82 years

Thursday

Mar 7, 2013 at 10:11 PMMar 8, 2013 at 4:45 AM

By Richard Duckett TELEGRAM & GAZETTE STAFF

The Higgins Armory Museum, an 82-year-old Worcester institution with an internationally renowned collection of arms and armor that is the second largest in the country, announced Friday it will permanently close Dec. 31 after losing a long battle to raise enough endowment money to ensure its future.

The collection will be moved and integrated into the Worcester Art Museum, which plans in time to display all of Higgins' core 2,000 objects. Higgins will stay open for the rest of the year and offer “top-notch” programs and events.

Although Higgins may not have succeeded in its long-term attempts to stay an individual entity, interim executive director Suzanne W. Maas said that she is excited the future of the collection has been secured and will be staying in Worcester. Meanwhile, Matthias Waschek, director of the Worcester Art Museum, said acquiring the collection gives the WAM “incredible opportunities.”

“Yes, we're staying in Worcester,” Ms. Maas said in an interview Wednesday. “But I expect people to grieve the loss of this building as we grieve the loss of it.”

The Higgins museum currently has a staff of nine full-time and 19 part-time employees. Their future will be one of several issues to be discussed in the weeks ahead, although some staff will likely be laid off. Ms. Maas said she will be stepping down at some point before the end of the year.

The mood was bittersweet inside Higgins' distinctive five-story all steel and glass building on Barber Avenue in the Greendale section of the city Wednesday. School children from Hollis-Brookline schools in New Hampshire on a museum tour were taking in with great interest the suits of armor, weapons and other objects on display. Enthusiastic children are a regular sight and sound at the museum as thousands of students throughout the region make visits as part of their social studies or science curriculums.

Ms. Maas, of the consulting firm Leadership Transitions and the interim executive director since July 2010, said the “bottom line is there is not enough endowment for us to be sustainable.”

The museum cannot earn its way out of a $350,000 to $400,000 annual operating deficit, she said, a lot of which is caused by the cost of maintaining the unusual art-deco building itself. (Ms. Maas said people have joked that there are “different climate zones in the building.”) The museum was continually drawing down on an endowment of about $2.9 million. It really needed an endowment of $15 million, she said.

Ms. Maas said more than two years ago she reluctantly had to give the news to the Higgins board that the museum's future was not sustainable. Since then, Higgins and WAM have had ongoing talks about a possible integration.

Mr. Waschek said he has been talking to Ms. Maas more or less from the time he arrived to become WAM's new director in November 2011.

There were several important outcomes that the Higgins board wanted to realize for the collection's future, Ms. Maas said. They included making sure the collection and its “long term stewardship” stay in Worcester. Higgins board members also wanted to see the museum's educational mission continued, and that the future of the collection be not only sustainable but “transformational” through new initiatives and programs.

Ms. Maas said the Higgins museum will “reopen” in the spring of 2014, when WAM will put on an arms and armor exhibition tentatively titled “Knight!” It will feature part of the Higgins collection. WAM plans to keep the exhibition running while it renovates old library space at the art museum to eventually create a permanent arms and armor gallery as well as “open storage space” where people can view all of the former Higgins museum collection items.

“As we are in the process of rethinking ourselves, we can pull something off, which really no one else can, which is integrate the Higgins (museum),” Mr. Waschek said.

The timing of events, in that sense, works out well for WAM.

“It can be transformational for us. We are writing a new chapter in the history of the Worcester Art Museum,” Mr. Waschek said. One of WAM's goals is to have 200,000 visitors annually by 2020. At the moment it has 60,000 visitors, “which is not high enough,” he said.

“The Higgins collection is of national, if not international importance, and it will help us have an impact regionally,” he said. The attraction of arms and armor can bring new visitors into the museum and then act as a bridge so that they can experience all of what WAM has to offer, he said.

That could be especially true of young people — such as the school children who were visiting Higgins. “It is for that reason, so bittersweet. You see how much fun they have,” he said of the visitors on Wednesday. But they will be able to see the same objects at WAM. “It gets children across the threshold.”

Ms. Maas said Higgins' arms and armory is the second largest public collection in the country behind the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

The Higgins Armory Museum was founded by early 20th-century Worcester industrialist John Woodman Higgins, who owned Worcester Pressed Steel Inc. and was an avid collector of arms and armor. The museum opened in 1931. Mr. Higgins died in 1961 and in 1978, the museum changed from a private foundation to a public supported charity.

The collection of arms and armor from all over the world dates back approximately 5,000 years. The museum puts on educational and other programs and special events throughout the year. Ms. Maas said that attendance has improved over the past couple of years.

From the beginning, however, the museum's endowment was always a challenge. Mr. Higgins' original endowment was $17,000, Ms. Haas said. The museum in recent years has not had enough support to grow its endowment, she said.

For “the survival of every nonprofit a healthy endowment is key,” said Mr. Waschek. The WAM's endowment is about $92 million, he said.

Still, 82 years for the Higgins Armory Museum was “an incredible run,” Ms. Maas said. And for the rest of the year people can “celebrate the legacy of John Woodman Higgins.” Many adults, like Wednesday's visitors, may have visited the Higgins on a tour when they were schoolchildren, or been taken there by their parents.

“We want people to come back and relive their experience from childhood,” Ms. Maas said.